My wife tells me, pulling weeds between squash and okra, the cardinal that sings outside out our window is Cody, returned on the anniversary of his death in the form of a bird. He’s singing now, on the wire right over my head.

I’m not convinced. He is dead after all. And anyway, we’re late. It was one year last week. Still, every morning, there it is, distinct from the rest, a pattern memorized in sleep. It follows me in to the den where I lie on the floor to stretch.

Through the curtain, the cardinal stands red on his wire, a cutout bird against blue sky. Cody had a way of always being around, calling every day and now and then showing up unannounced while things blew over at home. A puzzle of reasons I never questioned.

He’d stay, we’d drink too much and play gin, and in the morning he was gone before I woke, his breathing machine and duffel bag packed up in his truck and away.

In the garden, squash bristle with a change in the weather. Rain hisses up the gutters. My wife calls from the kitchen. I stretch, but my back won’t unlock. Outside, the cardinal clings to his wire and even sways in the wind.

About the Author

Marley Stuart is an Assistant Editor of Louisiana Literature and a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars. His stories and poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The Chattahoochee Review, Permafrost, Painted Bride Quarterly, Xavier Review, The Healing Muse, L’Éphémère Review, The Rising Phoenix Review, Occulum and About Place. He and his wife, the writer Kimberly Dawn Stuart, live in New Orleans and direct the small press River Glass Books.